I don't know if this is too far from the discussion on the last few pages, but I was thinking that there is a sliding scale of deities I don't believe in. At one end are the deities who interfere in people's lives.
I'm not sure how to define the other end, where a deity exists that I only weakly don't believe in. Someone mentioned Douglas Adams, and I smiled to myself remembering "God's Final Message to All Creation".
To me it is the personal that is most difficult to believe and smells to me most like horseshit. A deity who exists but doesn't care about people like me is slightly more believable. A deity who exists but doesn't care about individual lives is more believable. A dead or missing deity is more believable still.
But then, the stickiness of wanting meaning, self-affirmation and community means that religion is essentially inevitable. Or something that looks very much like it.
Blahblah, I like your sliding scale. I was thinking about a bored teenager in Alpha Centauri, who set up this universe, as a homework project, and then forgot he had done it. Hard to believe, really, but some writers have advanced it. The interesting thing is that it's not falsifiable, as far as I can see. But I don't think any religion is. Your point about stickiness is good. Wish-fulfilment?
I don't know if this is too far from the discussion on the last few pages, but I was thinking that there is a sliding scale of deities I don't believe in. At one end are the deities who interfere in people's lives.
I'm not sure how to define the other end, where a deity exists that I only weakly don't believe in. Someone mentioned Douglas Adams, and I smiled to myself remembering "God's Final Message to All Creation".
To me it is the personal that is most difficult to believe and smells to me most like horseshit. A deity who exists but doesn't care about people like me is slightly more believable. A deity who exists but doesn't care about individual lives is more believable. A dead or missing deity is more believable still.
But then, the stickiness of wanting meaning, self-affirmation and community means that religion is essentially inevitable. Or something that looks very much like it.
Almost entirely agree! Have you heard of the GPD, the General Purpose Deity in Jasper Fforde's books. I was recommended to read 'The Eyre Affair' * and after a somewhat puzzling beginning, it is a very good book. Thursday's brother, who appears in a subsequent book, is a Vicar in its church.
The rational God is as other as other can be. As other from the God of the Bible and all versions made up since. Except for (in, as) Jesus (in merely human experience). The rational God does not intervene, is not personal. Except...
...
The rational God has to be affected, shaped by creation. As I sit in a corner of the sofa. By us. By each individual. By each sparrow. Locally. And that localization doesn't travel. Its informatic effect on God is not felt by all of God. Any more than Jesus was all of a Person of God. The other empty corner doesn't feel me. When my wife is there it feels her. And a larger dimple of dimples feels us. Scales. And on and on. To the seven billion of us. On this mote dimple. Among infinite.
...
To every action there is an equal and opposite. But God does not affect us back. Not directly. Not any way that we can sense. He is the immanent, local, one-way cause of us the indirect effect, our personal ground of being. He 'cares' but not as we know it.
@Blahblah@Martin54
Well, I just got back from a church meeting I only happened to attend by mistake, and I guess I'm glad I did. It was about how we need to go Green theologically by affirming a Creator God who created all that we tend to call Nature and how we need to be a part of all that, and the speaker did refer to the fact that he was challenged at the Grand Canyon to have to include horribly huge mosquitoes in his sense of being at one with Creation and I and some others pointed out that that is not so easy to do, especially when you consider that there are a lot of things worse than mosquitoes to deal with in Nature/Creation.
Anyway, it was a good talk. Afterward I spoke with the speaker and he was sympathetic to my saying that there is a sense that it is all based on mythology, including the Genesis myth that originally in Eden all animals and humans were vegetarians, which of course was never true, at least not ever since plants and animals twigged off evolutionary into two branches and the animal section did not confine itself to eating only from the plant section--a la sharks, Tyrannosaurus Rex, saber toothed tigers and yes, ourselves (most of us). And then the myth that it is all yet to end with the lion lying down with the lamb and Jerusalem lifted high with her light streaming forth to all the earth so that all nations and peoples can come to worship in one holy House and eat at one holy Table, with all swords beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, and with no nations ever again lifting up sword against nation or ever learning war anymore.
The speaker agreed with me that all that is indeed mythological but also agreed that it may somehow be a dream of "God," and even if not, a dream still worth dreaming.
Loren Eiseley said that we humans are the dream animal.
Ah, but YOU @Blahblah are surely intelligent enough. And depth of thought can be well worth the effort.
Also the fact that something meant nothing to you does not mean you did not understand. I have read poetry that at first "meant nothing" to me on some level, only to later regard it as some of the greatest poetry in the world.
Ah, but YOU @Blahblah are surely intelligent enough. And depth of thought can be well worth the effort.
Also the fact that something meant nothing to you does not mean you did not understand. I have read poetry that at first "meant nothing" to me on some level, only to later regard it as some of the greatest poetry in the world.
I understood the words you used, just like I basically understand or could look up the words used in a discussion of tax law.
The fact is that I don't give a single shit. About tax law or about your fancy theories on New Testament historicity.
A discussion on this thread has been mostly about someone's religious epiphany. Something I respect, think may well be significant to that person. But equally something I believe us ultimately baloney.
I thought it was interesting because I think this "experiential religious experience" is the least believable type of interaction with a deity.
So. What has any of that got to do with the posts you write to me?
@Blahblah
You said, "So. What has any of that got to do with the posts you write to me?"
Nothing really. I admit that. But in an earlier post on another thread dealing with historical Jesus/the Baptist you said to me,
"Maybe you can try to explain, James Boswell, why it matters.
I don't care. Persuade me that I should take any notice of your flights of fancy."
I take that as an expression of some interest, and was amused by your expression "flights of fancy." One reason is because I try to ground what I believe in history. If you care to look at what I say, fine. But I will not be focusing in on trying to convince you in particular.
I see. So inside your own head it makes sense to reply to someone by name in a way that is in no sense follows on from anything they've said.
My wife tells me I have an annoying habit of holding a conversation comprising of three or more topics at once and then randomly chopping and changing between them. Sometimes picking up a conversation left hanging hours before.
But what you are doing seems like a stage beyond that. You are having a disjointed conversation with yourself and apparently randomly mentioning other people who may or may not know what you are talking about or understand how what you are saying follows what anyone has said, ever.
Your wife is perfectly correct. And she should know.
Indeed. I know I do it and that infuriates my family in general and my wife in particular.
I was trying to illustrate how this scatty way to communicate is even harder to understand when the people one is trying to talk with were not part of the conversation in the first place.
Gosh, I turn my back on this thread for a day, and this happens.
@Dave W: Ha! Yeah, I meant I felt the CofE's complacency needed to be 'disrupted' (and, I suppose, be less of an 'industry'), not all the rest of it. By odd coincidence I was speaking at a conference a couple of months ago on digital privacy, and ran into loads of eager mental-health tech startup enthusiasts - all of whom seemed to feel the reason we haven't yet cracked the problem of human sorrow is that it hasn't yet been appified. Heebie-jeebies again.
BTW, 'Salvation-as-a-Service' made me laugh out loud.
@SusanDoris Well, I feel like the track records of both secular and non-secular societies (and for that matter, those where the distinction doesn't really make sense) is pretty dismal all around. How to balance the Inquisition and Wars of Religion against the Cultural Revolution or the French Terror ... it's an ugly conversation that gets into gross tit-for-tats pretty fast. Anyway, the rising-tide-of-scientific-understanding-will-lift-us-all-to-a-Whig-history-happy-ending thing always puts me in mind of Good Country People. But probably that's just me.
@Martin54: I'm sorry to hear about your loss of faith. As someone who feels he has finally come into the/a fold after decades of wandering in the wilderness, I think I have some sense of what you're going through. I don't have any advice to give, except to say that I think some of your unhappiness might come from what looks to me (from our earlier conversations on this thread) like a very stark and reductive view of what the universe without God looks like. If you see biology purely in terms of self-interested agents at the genetic level, and everything above as cacophonous noise - yes, that's a pretty grim picture of the world, and I'm not sure it's one that really holds, even if you leave God entirely out of it. You might find Mary Midgley's Evolution as Religion an interesting read, and perhaps David Chalmer's The Character of Consciousness - at least for opening up some holes in the self-sealing reductive universe you might be feeling a bit trapped in right now. Again, YMMV; and I do hope you'll forgive me for taking liberties with my read on how you're feeling and why right now.
As for the rest of you ... I'm afraid I've found most of the conversations swirling around @James Boswell II's threads to be impenetrable and hostile, and I'm hesitant to stick my foot in the quicksand - particularly as one participant (@Blahblah) has already declared that the experience I've been prompted by @mark_in_manchester to relate is 'ultimately baloney'.
But anyway, I've already written a fair bit about it in-thread. I realise that nothing in that account is going to convince anyone who doesn't hold such experiences to be of special worth. All I can add, really, is that there's a kind of symmetry here. For anyone who hasn't had such a numinous experience, the fact that it's abnormal and unusual and inconsistent with everything in mundane, usual, common-reference experience is a good indication that there's something deficient (lacking in sanity, balance, etc) about the numinous experience. To someone who has, however, it's an indication that there's something deficient about mundane experience. It ends up, I think, being a difficult conversation to have.
I have some emotional/spiritual grounds for finding that projection 'real', but nothing I can defend in this kind of rational debate.
I think there's something interesting (sorry, just thinking out loud again, so I'm going to end up vague once more) going on here about 'emotional/spiritual grounds'. Because on one level they're just going to provoke an eye-roll from a strict rationalist: even leaving the 'spiritual' out of it, there's no such things as 'emotional grounds'. Those are just subjective waffle.
But then again, I think we've all seen examples of how rationality, divorced from some sort of sensible cognitive and emotional grounding, can get itself into weird loops. Anyone who's ever argued with a conspiracy theorist will be familiar with that 'through the looking glass' feeling of being in a rigidly self-consistent but totally insane world - in fact, I think one of the characteristics of conspiracy theories is just how tightly coherent they are. And I feel like back when I was in my 20s I trapped myself in a sort of genetic-determinism narrative for a while that I think was fed by unhealthy fires. A friend of mine got stuck in a Communism-actually-works-and-will-save-the-world Moebius strip about the same time, which AFAIK he still isn't out of. And then of course there are things like Descartes' demon hypothesis and the further ends of deconstruction which are sort of impossible to argue against but also require a certain kind of emotional gestalt to really seem to make sense or be appealing.
Of course, I'm not going to argue that religious sentiments are necessarily better foundations than any other. But maybe there's more to that old medieval truism about reason needing to be founded on faith than meets the eye ...
David Hume held that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
Here is a story I heard years ago, a true story I can never forget: Samuel Pagan came to the United States from Puerto Rico to study theology in one of our prestigious seminaries, and was being given his oral examination for a Phd in theology by several professors sitting with him at a table, asking him about the history of theology and about the great theologians of the past. At one point one of them asked, "Which theologian has influenced you the most?" And without hesitating, he said, "Jacinta Diaz."
The learned professors all looked at one another in surprise. None of them had heard of her. Was she a Latin American liberation or feminist theologian they had overlooked? What books had she written?
Samuel smiled and said that Jacinta Diaz had never written a book and never would. She was a simple woman who was a member in the church in Puerto Rico where he had grown up. And yet there was something about her that caused people to come to her from miles around to sit with her in her kitchen and share with her their sorrows, fears, and hopes and listen as she spoke gently with them, and laid gentle hands on them, and prayed with and for them, for people seemed to think that when they were in her presence, they were in the presence of God.
Her husband had died, I think, but she had a son who was something of a disappointment to her. He cared nothing for the church, liked to drink, and was considered a ne'er do well, yet she loved him dearly.
One day tragedy struck. Her son was drinking in a tavern outside the town when he and another drinker got into a dispute. Tempers flared, and suddenly the other man lashed out and struck her son who fell backward onto a sharp object, went into convulsions and soon died.
Someone went rushing to Diaz' home to tell her that her son had been killed in a senseless barroom brawl. She fell into despair and collapsed into a chair and neighbor women gathered, attempting to comfort her as she had comforted others.
Meanwhile at the tavern the killer was also in despair. He had not intended for anything like this to happen. In his agony he cried out, "Please! Please, someone bring me Jacinta Diaz!" He did not know it was her son he had killed.
Someone went running to her home and told her, "Can you believe this? The man who killed your son wants you to come and comfort him!"
There was silence. Then, slowly, Jacinta Diaz got up from the chair, took a shawl, went out the door, turned and walked the long distance to the tavern. And when she got there she did not go to the body of her son still lying covered on the floor. Instead, she went and sat with the man who had killed him, spoke gentle words to him, laid gentle hands on him, and prayed with and for him.
David Hume held that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
Sure, but I guess the rub is .... it needs to be of the right passions. On a public level ... well, it's hard to escape the fact that what made the great dictators of the 20th century so awful is that they were often extremely rational, in a means -> ends sort of way. And on a private level, one of my favourite Sigmund Freud quotes is "Everything a neurotic does is wrong. Because he's a neurotic."
But maybe there's more to that old medieval truism about reason needing to be founded on faith than meets the eye ...
I don't have the words to describe this, but my experience of faith (that something 'feely' precedes something which 'feels' (sorry) like 'knowledge') mirrors my former experience of being a university researcher in an engineering department. Here something often smelt bad (but how, I didn't know) and it would take a lot of work for me to work out in rational terms what that bad smell was. I must stress this argument is *not* about my brilliance, or prescience - I was a rather average researcher and my insights were 98% revelations for me only, with no novelty value - but from my personal perspective it did indeed feel like reason was founded on faith, and this in the dry, mathematically-mediated world of engineering.
(Incidentally having some background in machine learning, I am often reminded of this when folks start talking about 'emergent' bases for what we have been describing here as eusocial behaviour. It's an absolute f*cker when the machine iterates for 2 days (this was a long time ago) and takes you to a solution which you really don't want. One often starts reformulating the problem or the start location in the optimisation in order to achieve a more acceptable 'emergent' solution ... )
Host hat on @Martin54 this post doesn’t contribute to the subject of discussion, and comes very close to a personal attack which belongs in Hell, or trolling which belongs nowhere. Please desist. Host hat off
BroJames Purgatory Host
There have already been more than one warnings about egging on @James Boswell II given that he's on the verge of a permanent ban.
Let me spell that out a bit more:
Shipmates perceived to be attempting to, um, facilitate that outcome can expect their own behaviour to be treated by Admins as jerkish, and thus as a Commandment One breach. Which may in turn attract a suspension, or for those already on notice themselves, a ban.
Without passing judgement on who may or may not be a troll, advice not to poke or feed trolls applies here, for everyone's good.
And as always, no comments on this warning here. Styx or shut up.
David Hume held that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
Sure, but I guess the rub is .... it needs to be of the right passions. On a public level ... well, it's hard to escape the fact that what made the great dictators of the 20th century so awful is that they were often extremely rational, in a means -> ends sort of way. And on a private level, one of my favourite Sigmund Freud quotes is "Everything a neurotic does is wrong. Because he's a neurotic."
Thanks, Timo Pax, for the Freud quote! Alas, my brother-in-law is just such a character...
David Hume held that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
Sure, but I guess the rub is .... it needs to be of the right passions. On a public level ... well, it's hard to escape the fact that what made the great dictators of the 20th century so awful is that they were often extremely rational, in a means -> ends sort of way. And on a private level, one of my favourite Sigmund Freud quotes is "Everything a neurotic does is wrong. Because he's a neurotic."
Thanks, Timo Pax, for the Freud quote! Alas, my brother-in-law is just such a character...
Chesterton said something vaguely similar in Orthodoxy I think. That the person who considers himself an egg is not irrational but coldly rational - holding tightly to a particular understanding and not changing despite pressure.
I'd look it up for the exact quote but it isn't easy for me just now.
I once had a psychologist friend who took issue with this whole line of argument.
I guess I'd say that there are ways of thinking that have internal consistency and which make sense in a given space and with variables set in a specific way.
And so it follows that one can also be inconsistent and have ideas that make no sense even on their own terms.
But I don't think it is correct to assert that someone following through to an end consistent with internal constraints is therefore being rational per say.
I don't think rationality/irrationality works like that.
You can construct a self-contained scenario in which you believe the Moon landings were faked, but the consistency of your argument is not evidence of rationality.
I take it as read that my belief in an incarnate God is not rational by any modern definition of the word. It relies on the supernatural. And it's not particularly internally consistent either.
I don't have any evidence I can particularly point to - I can tell you that Jesus was a historical figure, and that if its claims were easily falsifiable, then either the 1st century Romans or the Jews would have done just that - but really, its persistence into the largest global religion is simultaneously explicable and inexplicable. So here we are.
It seems to me that there's a hierarchy of logical, rational, and reasonable. Logical means that the position is internally consistent, rational means that it's consistent with all the evidence and actually supported by some of the evidence, and reasonable means that it additionally doesn't wilfully violate common sense or a sense of proportion.
As for judging other people's meaning-of-life epiphanies ... well, yeah, I'm absolutely judging this guy for having such a shallow and trivial ending to his big-revelation story. How would I feel had it been more 'conventional'? Well, I suppose it depends on the person. A lot of people feel driven to create artistically because they feel they have something profound and important inside them they need to release and that's something I would hesitate to judge. OTOH I have an acquaintance who is desperate to sing in a very 'Pop Idol' kind of way, because she desperately craves adulation and celebrity - and if she were to emerge from a near-death experience with that craving intact, I would think it was sad.
And then of course there's another kind of 'meaning' narrative which is about bettering the world, helping others, and other social ends.
Sure, we can't all be Greta Thunberg. But maybe that's a problem - and maybe a stronger sense of human dignity and focusing less on superficialities in the society at large would help that, in a way I suspect men's grooming products tend not to foster.
But it really isn't shallow and trivial! Rather than working for other people he's decided to work for himself and create something. That's a pretty big deal in my view.
Actually, there are a hell of a lot of men who would be healthier, happier and more content if they took a bit better care of themselves so men's grooming products can play a part in making the world a better place.
snip
I would have said the opposite - that most people's commonsense intuition is that life does have a transcendental meaning. But I think that religion is a consequence of that (IMHO) mistaken belief, not a reflection of its truth.
I've been using "transcendent" (or transcendental) to mean that something has its origins beyond mundane human experience - like a sense of purpose or moral sentiments that are believed to come from God or are somehow inherent in the broader Universe - rather than to distinguish between selfish and unselfish.
Someone who finds meaning in (e.g.) helping others may or may not believe that meaning or purpose derives from God or inherent properties of the Universe (what I've been calling transcendental.) I think most people think it does, whether they explicitly subscribe to religious beliefs or not (and there are a lot of people who do in the US and around the world, even if there aren't so many in the UK and Europe these days.) But I suspect the arrow of causation may go the other way; the general evolved propensity to value eusocial behavior has been projected outward onto ideas about God and the Universe.
That may be common but it contains no sense. It's a combination of wishful thinking and projecting our human consciousness on to an insensate and oblivious universe. Life has no meaning, other than the meaning we individually give to that portion of existence we have some control over.
Oh, there's nothing wrong with it per se. It just seems laughably banal as a conclusion to a life-changing experience.
Do you not find anything strange about it? It's as if Moses came down from the mountain and revealed that God had told him to found a chain of convenience stores. Nothing wrong with convenience stores! They're very convenient! But they seem somewhat less than satisfying as an answer to life, the universe, and everything.
Well, the church is a convenience store for the soul* but as an answer to life, the universe, and everything it's sadly lacking.
The living Christ will continue to be known throughout the world, however people try to discredit the people who are his Church, or try to explain away his existence and teaching as if it isn't the truth. God is.
In the end, we either keep an open mind and allow the possibility of being convinced of this, or close our minds and refuse to accept this.
Oh the irony. Arguing that people need to keep an open mind after expressing your convictions as absolute fact suggests your own mind needs to be open to the possibility of error.
I don't know if this is too far from the discussion on the last few pages, but I was thinking that there is a sliding scale of deities I don't believe in. At one end are the deities who interfere in people's lives.
I'm not sure how to define the other end, where a deity exists that I only weakly don't believe in. Someone mentioned Douglas Adams, and I smiled to myself remembering "God's Final Message to All Creation".
To me it is the personal that is most difficult to believe and smells to me most like horseshit. A deity who exists but doesn't care about people like me is slightly more believable. A deity who exists but doesn't care about individual lives is more believable. A dead or missing deity is more believable still.
But then, the stickiness of wanting meaning, self-affirmation and community means that religion is essentially inevitable. Or something that looks very much like it.
It's the personal deity I find impossible. And more than a bit creepy.
@Timo Pax
The true story of Jacinta Diaz illustrates, it seems to me, that the essence of faith, even one might say an amazingly "sophisticated" faith, can be found among unsophisticated people, which perhaps should humble those of us who consider ourselves so erudite.
According to Q, Jesus after receiving good news of the success of one of his disciples' preaching and healing missions among the people, cried out with joy, "I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for revealing to the simple and childlike things hidden from the learned. Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will."
That is one of the few times in the synoptic gospels where we hear Jesus praying, and indeed, if those words and the words that follow actually represent an unguarded moment in the life of Jesus, it would seem that he himself suddenly became aware that his disciples were listening, for he adds (with no Amen or closing statement!) the following words, which, as someone once said, of all the synoptic sayings of Jesus, are the only ones that "sound as if they fell like a meteor from the Johannine heaven":
"All things have been given to me by my Father,
and no one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son,
and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."
Such "high" Christology in a synoptic gospel! And moreover in a portion of the earliest recoverable strata Q!
__________
The genuine faith of Jacinta Diaz reminds me of one of William Faulkner's most amazing characters in his most amazing novel, The Sound and the Fury -- the black cook and servant Dilsey. Critics are still arguing, I think, over whether her simple deep faith was intended by Faulkner as an sign for how all of us should be, or is only one more indication (since she is "only" an unsophisticated, uneducated person) that life really is nothing more than "a tale told by and idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Even Paul with all his learning could say that the message of the cross seems like "foolishness" to the sophisticated.
But it really isn't shallow and trivial! Rather than working for other people he's decided to work for himself and create something. That's a pretty big deal in my view.
Actually, there are a hell of a lot of men who would be healthier, happier and more content if they took a bit better care of themselves so men's grooming products can play a part in making the world a better place.
I guess most people who do have a NDE remain largely untroubled by any thoughts of changing their ways or doing anything different with their lives. They just count themselves lucky, and carry on regardless.
But I'm with Timo on this. If it was my take-home on a near-death experience, I'd be disappointed in myself. I'd be looking for more profundity, rather than something I might think of in the shower one morning.
(disclosure: my near-death experience didn't alter my behaviour one bit. Arguably, I was already living my best life and didn't see the need to change.)
One of my life's disappointments was not having a near-death experience, when they put me under, prior to my brain surgery.
The anaesthetic was so powerful, I guess, that I didn't even get to count down from 10 as far as 9...no, it was like a light being turned off. I only remember this, obviously, because I woke up (again, very quickly) in Recovery.
Point of story - if there is no after-life, and death is instant oblivion, what's to worry about? As Doc Tor says, live the best life NOW.
I find the use of NDE confusing here. I thought most NDEs are considered to be not just "I damn near almost died" but, "I am utterly convinced that I had a remarkably real experience after I was thought to be clinically dead or nearly so."
And yes, those who have that experience (I never have!) usually say it greatly altered their lives. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I find the use of NDE confusing here. I thought most NDEs are considered to be not just "I damn near almost died" but, "I am utterly convinced that I had a remarkably real experience after I was thought to be clinically dead or nearly so."
And yes, those who have that experience (I never have!) usually say it greatly altered their lives. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I suspect that those who choose to talk about their NDEs are overwhelming of the view that it changed their lives but that those who choose to talk are only a proportion of those who have experienced an NDE.
I think NDEs can take many forms from the shining light and voice of God to not remembering anything about it.
Good point. I might have had a near-death experience whilst I was unconscious (the surgery took about 5 hours), but I certainly don't remember anything!
The living Christ will continue to be known throughout the world, however people try to discredit the people who are his Church, or try to explain away his existence and teaching as if it isn't the truth. God is.
In the end, we either keep an open mind and allow the possibility of being convinced of this, or close our minds and refuse to accept this.
Oh the irony. Arguing that people need to keep an open mind after expressing your convictions as absolute fact suggests your own mind needs to be open to the possibility of error.
Once we are convinced of what we believe to be the truth, it doesn't mean that we will never become unconvinced.
But if we won't allow ourselves to be convinced in the first place, because we've closed our minds to possibility, does that mean we can never be convinced?
I'll take the opportunity to repeat Timo Pax's excellent paragraph here, as I think it apposite:
I realise that nothing in that account is going to convince anyone who doesn't hold such experiences to be of special worth. All I can add, really, is that there's a kind of symmetry here. For anyone who hasn't had such a numinous experience, the fact that it's abnormal and unusual and inconsistent with everything in mundane, usual, common-reference experience is a good indication that there's something deficient (lacking in sanity, balance, etc) about the numinous experience. To someone who has, however, it's an indication that there's something deficient about mundane experience. It ends up, I think, being a difficult conversation to have.
I find the use of NDE confusing here. I thought most NDEs are considered to be not just "I damn near almost died" but, "I am utterly convinced that I had a remarkably real experience after I was thought to be clinically dead or nearly so."
And yes, those who have that experience (I never have!) usually say it greatly altered their lives. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I suspect that those who choose to talk about their NDEs are overwhelming of the view that it changed their lives but that those who choose to talk are only a proportion of those who have experienced an NDE.
I think NDEs can take many forms from the shining light and voice of God to not remembering anything about it.
When you say that last, that seems to me more like experiencing a near death, not having a near death experience.
Comments
I'm not sure how to define the other end, where a deity exists that I only weakly don't believe in. Someone mentioned Douglas Adams, and I smiled to myself remembering "God's Final Message to All Creation".
To me it is the personal that is most difficult to believe and smells to me most like horseshit. A deity who exists but doesn't care about people like me is slightly more believable. A deity who exists but doesn't care about individual lives is more believable. A dead or missing deity is more believable still.
But then, the stickiness of wanting meaning, self-affirmation and community means that religion is essentially inevitable. Or something that looks very much like it.
*by an SofF mem ber actually.
...
The rational God has to be affected, shaped by creation. As I sit in a corner of the sofa. By us. By each individual. By each sparrow. Locally. And that localization doesn't travel. Its informatic effect on God is not felt by all of God. Any more than Jesus was all of a Person of God. The other empty corner doesn't feel me. When my wife is there it feels her. And a larger dimple of dimples feels us. Scales. And on and on. To the seven billion of us. On this mote dimple. Among infinite.
...
To every action there is an equal and opposite. But God does not affect us back. Not directly. Not any way that we can sense. He is the immanent, local, one-way cause of us the indirect effect, our personal ground of being. He 'cares' but not as we know it.
Except...
Talking of Whom. He's local too. All the way up.
Well, I just got back from a church meeting I only happened to attend by mistake, and I guess I'm glad I did. It was about how we need to go Green theologically by affirming a Creator God who created all that we tend to call Nature and how we need to be a part of all that, and the speaker did refer to the fact that he was challenged at the Grand Canyon to have to include horribly huge mosquitoes in his sense of being at one with Creation and I and some others pointed out that that is not so easy to do, especially when you consider that there are a lot of things worse than mosquitoes to deal with in Nature/Creation.
Anyway, it was a good talk. Afterward I spoke with the speaker and he was sympathetic to my saying that there is a sense that it is all based on mythology, including the Genesis myth that originally in Eden all animals and humans were vegetarians, which of course was never true, at least not ever since plants and animals twigged off evolutionary into two branches and the animal section did not confine itself to eating only from the plant section--a la sharks, Tyrannosaurus Rex, saber toothed tigers and yes, ourselves (most of us). And then the myth that it is all yet to end with the lion lying down with the lamb and Jerusalem lifted high with her light streaming forth to all the earth so that all nations and peoples can come to worship in one holy House and eat at one holy Table, with all swords beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, and with no nations ever again lifting up sword against nation or ever learning war anymore.
The speaker agreed with me that all that is indeed mythological but also agreed that it may somehow be a dream of "God," and even if not, a dream still worth dreaming.
Loren Eiseley said that we humans are the dream animal.
I know whereof I speak.
Also the fact that something meant nothing to you does not mean you did not understand. I have read poetry that at first "meant nothing" to me on some level, only to later regard it as some of the greatest poetry in the world.
I understood the words you used, just like I basically understand or could look up the words used in a discussion of tax law.
The fact is that I don't give a single shit. About tax law or about your fancy theories on New Testament historicity.
A discussion on this thread has been mostly about someone's religious epiphany. Something I respect, think may well be significant to that person. But equally something I believe us ultimately baloney.
I thought it was interesting because I think this "experiential religious experience" is the least believable type of interaction with a deity.
So. What has any of that got to do with the posts you write to me?
Er, yours ain't the problem.
Thank you.
You said, "So. What has any of that got to do with the posts you write to me?"
Nothing really. I admit that. But in an earlier post on another thread dealing with historical Jesus/the Baptist you said to me,
"Maybe you can try to explain, James Boswell, why it matters.
I don't care. Persuade me that I should take any notice of your flights of fancy."
I take that as an expression of some interest, and was amused by your expression "flights of fancy." One reason is because I try to ground what I believe in history. If you care to look at what I say, fine. But I will not be focusing in on trying to convince you in particular.
My wife tells me I have an annoying habit of holding a conversation comprising of three or more topics at once and then randomly chopping and changing between them. Sometimes picking up a conversation left hanging hours before.
But what you are doing seems like a stage beyond that. You are having a disjointed conversation with yourself and apparently randomly mentioning other people who may or may not know what you are talking about or understand how what you are saying follows what anyone has said, ever.
That must be a weird thing to experience.
Indeed. I know I do it and that infuriates my family in general and my wife in particular.
I was trying to illustrate how this scatty way to communicate is even harder to understand when the people one is trying to talk with were not part of the conversation in the first place.
@Dave W: Ha! Yeah, I meant I felt the CofE's complacency needed to be 'disrupted' (and, I suppose, be less of an 'industry'), not all the rest of it. By odd coincidence I was speaking at a conference a couple of months ago on digital privacy, and ran into loads of eager mental-health tech startup enthusiasts - all of whom seemed to feel the reason we haven't yet cracked the problem of human sorrow is that it hasn't yet been appified. Heebie-jeebies again.
BTW, 'Salvation-as-a-Service' made me laugh out loud.
@SusanDoris Well, I feel like the track records of both secular and non-secular societies (and for that matter, those where the distinction doesn't really make sense) is pretty dismal all around. How to balance the Inquisition and Wars of Religion against the Cultural Revolution or the French Terror ... it's an ugly conversation that gets into gross tit-for-tats pretty fast. Anyway, the rising-tide-of-scientific-understanding-will-lift-us-all-to-a-Whig-history-happy-ending thing always puts me in mind of Good Country People. But probably that's just me.
@Martin54: I'm sorry to hear about your loss of faith. As someone who feels he has finally come into the/a fold after decades of wandering in the wilderness, I think I have some sense of what you're going through. I don't have any advice to give, except to say that I think some of your unhappiness might come from what looks to me (from our earlier conversations on this thread) like a very stark and reductive view of what the universe without God looks like. If you see biology purely in terms of self-interested agents at the genetic level, and everything above as cacophonous noise - yes, that's a pretty grim picture of the world, and I'm not sure it's one that really holds, even if you leave God entirely out of it. You might find Mary Midgley's Evolution as Religion an interesting read, and perhaps David Chalmer's The Character of Consciousness - at least for opening up some holes in the self-sealing reductive universe you might be feeling a bit trapped in right now. Again, YMMV; and I do hope you'll forgive me for taking liberties with my read on how you're feeling and why right now.
But anyway, I've already written a fair bit about it in-thread. I realise that nothing in that account is going to convince anyone who doesn't hold such experiences to be of special worth. All I can add, really, is that there's a kind of symmetry here. For anyone who hasn't had such a numinous experience, the fact that it's abnormal and unusual and inconsistent with everything in mundane, usual, common-reference experience is a good indication that there's something deficient (lacking in sanity, balance, etc) about the numinous experience. To someone who has, however, it's an indication that there's something deficient about mundane experience. It ends up, I think, being a difficult conversation to have.
I think there's something interesting (sorry, just thinking out loud again, so I'm going to end up vague once more) going on here about 'emotional/spiritual grounds'. Because on one level they're just going to provoke an eye-roll from a strict rationalist: even leaving the 'spiritual' out of it, there's no such things as 'emotional grounds'. Those are just subjective waffle.
But then again, I think we've all seen examples of how rationality, divorced from some sort of sensible cognitive and emotional grounding, can get itself into weird loops. Anyone who's ever argued with a conspiracy theorist will be familiar with that 'through the looking glass' feeling of being in a rigidly self-consistent but totally insane world - in fact, I think one of the characteristics of conspiracy theories is just how tightly coherent they are. And I feel like back when I was in my 20s I trapped myself in a sort of genetic-determinism narrative for a while that I think was fed by unhealthy fires. A friend of mine got stuck in a Communism-actually-works-and-will-save-the-world Moebius strip about the same time, which AFAIK he still isn't out of. And then of course there are things like Descartes' demon hypothesis and the further ends of deconstruction which are sort of impossible to argue against but also require a certain kind of emotional gestalt to really seem to make sense or be appealing.
Of course, I'm not going to argue that religious sentiments are necessarily better foundations than any other. But maybe there's more to that old medieval truism about reason needing to be founded on faith than meets the eye ...
The learned professors all looked at one another in surprise. None of them had heard of her. Was she a Latin American liberation or feminist theologian they had overlooked? What books had she written?
Samuel smiled and said that Jacinta Diaz had never written a book and never would. She was a simple woman who was a member in the church in Puerto Rico where he had grown up. And yet there was something about her that caused people to come to her from miles around to sit with her in her kitchen and share with her their sorrows, fears, and hopes and listen as she spoke gently with them, and laid gentle hands on them, and prayed with and for them, for people seemed to think that when they were in her presence, they were in the presence of God.
Her husband had died, I think, but she had a son who was something of a disappointment to her. He cared nothing for the church, liked to drink, and was considered a ne'er do well, yet she loved him dearly.
One day tragedy struck. Her son was drinking in a tavern outside the town when he and another drinker got into a dispute. Tempers flared, and suddenly the other man lashed out and struck her son who fell backward onto a sharp object, went into convulsions and soon died.
Someone went rushing to Diaz' home to tell her that her son had been killed in a senseless barroom brawl. She fell into despair and collapsed into a chair and neighbor women gathered, attempting to comfort her as she had comforted others.
Meanwhile at the tavern the killer was also in despair. He had not intended for anything like this to happen. In his agony he cried out, "Please! Please, someone bring me Jacinta Diaz!" He did not know it was her son he had killed.
Someone went running to her home and told her, "Can you believe this? The man who killed your son wants you to come and comfort him!"
There was silence. Then, slowly, Jacinta Diaz got up from the chair, took a shawl, went out the door, turned and walked the long distance to the tavern. And when she got there she did not go to the body of her son still lying covered on the floor. Instead, she went and sat with the man who had killed him, spoke gentle words to him, laid gentle hands on him, and prayed with and for him.
Sure, but I guess the rub is .... it needs to be of the right passions. On a public level ... well, it's hard to escape the fact that what made the great dictators of the 20th century so awful is that they were often extremely rational, in a means -> ends sort of way. And on a private level, one of my favourite Sigmund Freud quotes is "Everything a neurotic does is wrong. Because he's a neurotic."
Did anyone read this? Was it worth the effort?
I don't have the words to describe this, but my experience of faith (that something 'feely' precedes something which 'feels' (sorry) like 'knowledge') mirrors my former experience of being a university researcher in an engineering department. Here something often smelt bad (but how, I didn't know) and it would take a lot of work for me to work out in rational terms what that bad smell was. I must stress this argument is *not* about my brilliance, or prescience - I was a rather average researcher and my insights were 98% revelations for me only, with no novelty value - but from my personal perspective it did indeed feel like reason was founded on faith, and this in the dry, mathematically-mediated world of engineering.
(Incidentally having some background in machine learning, I am often reminded of this when folks start talking about 'emergent' bases for what we have been describing here as eusocial behaviour. It's an absolute f*cker when the machine iterates for 2 days (this was a long time ago) and takes you to a solution which you really don't want. One often starts reformulating the problem or the start location in the optimisation in order to achieve a more acceptable 'emergent' solution ...
@Martin54 this post doesn’t contribute to the subject of discussion, and comes very close to a personal attack which belongs in Hell, or trolling which belongs nowhere. Please desist.
Host hat off
BroJames Purgatory Host
There have already been more than one warnings about egging on @James Boswell II given that he's on the verge of a permanent ban.
Let me spell that out a bit more:
Shipmates perceived to be attempting to, um, facilitate that outcome can expect their own behaviour to be treated by Admins as jerkish, and thus as a Commandment One breach. Which may in turn attract a suspension, or for those already on notice themselves, a ban.
Without passing judgement on who may or may not be a troll, advice not to poke or feed trolls applies here, for everyone's good.
And as always, no comments on this warning here. Styx or shut up.
/admin mode
Thanks, Timo Pax, for the Freud quote! Alas, my brother-in-law is just such a character...
Chesterton said something vaguely similar in Orthodoxy I think. That the person who considers himself an egg is not irrational but coldly rational - holding tightly to a particular understanding and not changing despite pressure.
I'd look it up for the exact quote but it isn't easy for me just now.
I once had a psychologist friend who took issue with this whole line of argument.
I guess I'd say that there are ways of thinking that have internal consistency and which make sense in a given space and with variables set in a specific way.
And so it follows that one can also be inconsistent and have ideas that make no sense even on their own terms.
But I don't think it is correct to assert that someone following through to an end consistent with internal constraints is therefore being rational per say.
I don't think rationality/irrationality works like that.
I take it as read that my belief in an incarnate God is not rational by any modern definition of the word. It relies on the supernatural. And it's not particularly internally consistent either.
I don't have any evidence I can particularly point to - I can tell you that Jesus was a historical figure, and that if its claims were easily falsifiable, then either the 1st century Romans or the Jews would have done just that - but really, its persistence into the largest global religion is simultaneously explicable and inexplicable. So here we are.
But it really isn't shallow and trivial! Rather than working for other people he's decided to work for himself and create something. That's a pretty big deal in my view.
Actually, there are a hell of a lot of men who would be healthier, happier and more content if they took a bit better care of themselves so men's grooming products can play a part in making the world a better place.
That may be common but it contains no sense. It's a combination of wishful thinking and projecting our human consciousness on to an insensate and oblivious universe. Life has no meaning, other than the meaning we individually give to that portion of existence we have some control over.
Well, the church is a convenience store for the soul* but as an answer to life, the universe, and everything it's sadly lacking.
*Not that we actually have a soul.
Oh the irony. Arguing that people need to keep an open mind after expressing your convictions as absolute fact suggests your own mind needs to be open to the possibility of error.
It's the personal deity I find impossible. And more than a bit creepy.
The true story of Jacinta Diaz illustrates, it seems to me, that the essence of faith, even one might say an amazingly "sophisticated" faith, can be found among unsophisticated people, which perhaps should humble those of us who consider ourselves so erudite.
According to Q, Jesus after receiving good news of the success of one of his disciples' preaching and healing missions among the people, cried out with joy,
"I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for revealing to the simple and childlike things hidden from the learned. Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will."
That is one of the few times in the synoptic gospels where we hear Jesus praying, and indeed, if those words and the words that follow actually represent an unguarded moment in the life of Jesus, it would seem that he himself suddenly became aware that his disciples were listening, for he adds (with no Amen or closing statement!) the following words, which, as someone once said, of all the synoptic sayings of Jesus, are the only ones that "sound as if they fell like a meteor from the Johannine heaven":
"All things have been given to me by my Father,
and no one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son,
and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."
Such "high" Christology in a synoptic gospel! And moreover in a portion of the earliest recoverable strata Q!
__________
The genuine faith of Jacinta Diaz reminds me of one of William Faulkner's most amazing characters in his most amazing novel, The Sound and the Fury -- the black cook and servant Dilsey. Critics are still arguing, I think, over whether her simple deep faith was intended by Faulkner as an sign for how all of us should be, or is only one more indication (since she is "only" an unsophisticated, uneducated person) that life really is nothing more than "a tale told by and idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Even Paul with all his learning could say that the message of the cross seems like "foolishness" to the sophisticated.
I guess most people who do have a NDE remain largely untroubled by any thoughts of changing their ways or doing anything different with their lives. They just count themselves lucky, and carry on regardless.
But I'm with Timo on this. If it was my take-home on a near-death experience, I'd be disappointed in myself. I'd be looking for more profundity, rather than something I might think of in the shower one morning.
(disclosure: my near-death experience didn't alter my behaviour one bit. Arguably, I was already living my best life and didn't see the need to change.)
One of my life's disappointments was not having a near-death experience, when they put me under, prior to my brain surgery.
The anaesthetic was so powerful, I guess, that I didn't even get to count down from 10 as far as 9...no, it was like a light being turned off. I only remember this, obviously, because I woke up (again, very quickly) in Recovery.
Point of story - if there is no after-life, and death is instant oblivion, what's to worry about? As Doc Tor says, live the best life NOW.
It was.
And yes, those who have that experience (I never have!) usually say it greatly altered their lives. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I suspect that those who choose to talk about their NDEs are overwhelming of the view that it changed their lives but that those who choose to talk are only a proportion of those who have experienced an NDE.
I think NDEs can take many forms from the shining light and voice of God to not remembering anything about it.
I guess they may have made you more careful when crossing the road, or climbing, but you know what I mean!
Once we are convinced of what we believe to be the truth, it doesn't mean that we will never become unconvinced.
But if we won't allow ourselves to be convinced in the first place, because we've closed our minds to possibility, does that mean we can never be convinced?
I'll take the opportunity to repeat Timo Pax's excellent paragraph here, as I think it apposite:
When you say that last, that seems to me more like experiencing a near death, not having a near death experience.